| Probably harsh, but nevertheless my point of view. Your view seems to be informed by ignorance. For instance, your claim that they've only given back where they couldn't "rip off" BSD/MIT-licensed code is pretty specious when Apple's largest contributions are to BSD-licensed projects that they use. Who exactly is getting ripped off? it's a _huge_ company with lots of money. What differences does that make? Your prior criticism was that they took much from open source and gave back little.
When you bring money into it, you're making it sound like their contributions should be based on what they have, not what they have taken. That doesn't seem very fair given how many of their employees and how much of their revenue has very little at all to do with things taken from open source. A more reasonable perspective is that they should give back in proportion to what they took, rather than that they should give back in proportion to how much money they have. The former is fairness, the latter is entitlement. webkit came from khtml That was seven years ago. Longer than KHTML even existed before Apple's fork. A lot has changed in that time. Today, much of the development on KTHML is backported from WebKit, which is itself a vastly more active and widespread open source project than KHTML ever was. Half a dozen projects and millions of users have benefited from Apple's development efforts. I don't see how this can be interpreted as anything less than an open source success story. (hello quicktime, hello itunes) I'm not sure what you're getting at. Both of those products use standard non-proprietary formats by default. I could nearly bet that MS does more open source then apple.
If it's not already the case, apple is heading in that direction. Could you cite examples of Microsoft's open source contributions for comparison? Or explain how Apple is "heading in that direction"? |